Against Distance

The poetry of Peter Makuck does for the coastal waters of North Carolina what Wallace Stevens did for the Florida Keys, and Robinson Jeffers for Big Sur. He revives in language the very look, feel, and smell of beach and wetlands, and gives a human measure to the complex imbrication of shore, sky and sea

Peter Makuck’s poems are as beautiful and well-made as the best poems of his contemporaries. What set them apart from and above virtually all of them, howver, is their ethos, their attentiveness to the world outside the self and their capactiy to love: people, creatures, landscape. Makuck’s poetry shows us not only how to see, but how to live

Against Distance is a singular book, plentiful with fresh ways to look and listen. It has the wholeness of experience rendered as close while far, as distant while proximate. Peter Makuck is a poet of great power and skill, of substantial achievement and genuine significance

Virtually anything that catches his eye shimmers with the authority of his language. He can be funny, too, as in a parody of a famous poem by James Wright . . . Against Distance should be the book whereby Peter Makuck’s reputation catches up with his talents. An unabashed venerator, one of a very few poets writing now who can take St. Catherine of Siena’s “All the way to heaven is heaven” as epigraph and be trusted that he means it, he helps us to live where “the air clears, as if someone had focussed a lens, / removed a moment from the day / and made it lively forever.”

Peter Makuck offers careful lessons in seeing (in every sense of the word). Such seeing, these thirty-nine poems suggest, is necessary if we re to find out way toward what will mend us and close the gaps that separate us from each other and from the world. . . . Elegant in their directness, in their attention to detail, these poems take the reader many places